Lee Rourke has not consigned himself to any single form. He is the author of a novel (The Canal), a collection of short stories (Everyday) and a literary study (A Brief History of Fables). His new collection of highly fragmented prose poems, Varroa Destructor, presents a portrait of mechanised banality and decay that often seems intent on stepping outside form altogether. Shorn of what Rourke calls the ‘filthy habit’ of poetic language, Varroa Destructor is a record of ideological ensnarement and formal escape. It is published by 3:AM Press.
How did you go about writing these poems?
I don’t really know where they came from. Because they’re all about everyday decay, I suspect that they emerged from the trauma of family illness. My mother died of cancer and my father has Parkinson’s. They just accumulated over time, but once I’d written enough of them, I immediately hated them because they were… overtly poetic. So I decided to dismantle them and then reconstruct. I took them apart, took everything that I thought was poetic out of them, and in doing so I think was able to cleanse the language. So, yeah, I think they come out of a trauma, an obsession with decay – and particularly the decay I see in language. They come from a need cleanse it.
Does this desire to cleanse language bear any relation to the varroa destructor, that external parasitic mite you’ve chosen for the title of your collection?
Kind of, yeah. I’m obsessed with the writings of Jacques Derrida and with the poet Francis Ponge, in particular a work of his called Soap, where he treats poetry as if it were an experiment in a laboratory. He wants to approach the event of the object through language and its cleansing. He’s obsessed with paring language down in this sense, with not being poetic, with not being ‘literary’. And this correlates with what Derrida says in his reading of Hegel in Glas.
As readers, he says, we’re like a dredging machine that plunges into the water and lifts up the silt and the shit and the mud. What falls away in language is that quantity we can’t really come to terms with; that’s what we’re left with. It ties in with Wallace Stevens and that unanswerable imagination that we’re always trying to reach. The varroa destructor bit for me is the glitch, the gremlin, the part where language destroys or expunges itself. We can’t really reach those moments of beautiful imagination because language is there eating away and destroying everything we’re trying to achieve. Also, I just love the title Varroa Destructor.
Everyone else seems to be writing about bees so I thought I’d talk about the mite that’s killing them, even though I love bees.
In the poem ‘alarm’, you write: “she appeared within a dream stealing manuscripts tearing sheet after sheet into little pieces […] the remains of the tampered manuscript snatched from her inquisitive grasp in pieces.” Is Varroa Destructor that “tampered manuscript”? What do you think is so attractive about the idea of the fragment?
Yeah, I think it is. I like the idea of detritus, going back again to Derrida and what’s left behind. For me, this endless search to create a grand unifying narrative is a loser’s game because it’s simply not possible to piece everything back together with language. Language lacks that ability. I prefer to have fun with the shards, with the detritus and the broken bits. I attempt to put them together, but I know there’ll be jagged edges and gaping voids in what I’m trying to piece together. And that’s perfectly fine by me.
Based on my perhaps limited reading, these poems stand alongside those of Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities as some of the few texts I know to engage with the oppressive banality of everyday life. Is there something about shorter, fragmentary forms that lend themselves better to this kind of engagement than, say, the novel?
Quite possibly. We always try to ignore the everyday fragments of our lives. We push them aside, hoping there’s a bigger picture that will make more sense. That doesn’t really make sense to me. What I’m really interested in is that kind of humdrum minutiae that we are told is meaningless.
I think that the accumulation of these fragments within our lives, these banal moments, these moments where there’s a blank space, where nothing is happening, I think these are tremendously important. They’re the culmination of our lives; they’re what keep us ticking. Without trying to sound too grandiose, they are us. They’re so important, and it frightens me that we purposely ignore them.
You include a series of endnotes, detailing the influence or purpose of some of the poems in the collection. Is this an attempt to maintain sovereignty over your work – to prevent others from ‘misreading’ it?
No. I want to open up the intertextuality of poetry. I want to make it obvious. I don’t want to be as covertly symbolic as some poetry is. I want there to be a little opening into the realm of intertextuality. That’s what those notes are trying to do. Saying that, there could have been four or five pages of them, but I worried people would think I was trying to be T.S. Eliot. Instead, I’ve just given a little glimpse of I’m trying to do.
Funny you should mention T.S. Eliot and intertextuality. The first few poems remind me a lot of a passage in The Waste Land: “Unreal city, / under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” In Varroa Destructor’s first few poems, you write of “a surge of grey” and then: “each intake of breath there is a moment – something could be uttered – but nothing is externalised except the tapping of feet.” Is there anything to this?
Probably not. I mean, I can’t underestimate the influence of T.S. Eliot’s poetry in my life. I really can’t. I read him when I was fifteen and was completely blown away by it – just by its complete and utter foreignness to me, or what I had perceived poetry to be up until that moment. So when you’re confronted with that sort of writing, I think it’s hard to shake its influence. I certainly didn’t have T.S. Eliot in mind as those poems were being written, but I can see that, somewhere within the dark recesses of my little mind, he will have been an influence.
